Posted by Noah
a resident of University South
on Jul 8, 2008 at 9:22 pm

Thank you City Council members and staff for moving this project forward. I've been a long time supporter of improving our broadband infrastructure, and this proposal looks to be the best shot in several years of discussion, RFPS, and debate.

The great part of this is that it costs the city nothing beyond already existing infrastructure, which can all be purchased back for $1 in 25 years or if the companies under-perform.

The interesting win here is that the businesses making the offer would only directly resell to other businesses, which will in turn vastly decrease their cost over previous attempts. Other providers such as incumbents Comcast and ATT could consider using the city-wide fiber back-haul to their local access points, providing higher bandwidth with minimal investment on their part.

What's the worst that happens? Our already existing fiber is run by non-governmental companies that underperform, and then the city can reclaim the fiber. Best thing? Innovation. Perhaps a progressive area of the city will set-up a co-op with 100Mbit connections to each home. It's a stretch, but before this proposal, it would have been impossible.

Posted by The-City-Government-Is-Clueless
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on Jul 9, 2008 at 8:12 am

> The tech-firm consortium would build, own and operate the network.
> Retail service providers such as Comcast would be the middlemen
> utimately selling services to customers.

It is not very likely that Comcast would be involved with such an undertaking (other than to perhaps sue the City of Palo Alto). Comcast is currently offering 16 mpbs service in Palo Alto, and is planning to offer 100 mpbs service in the near 2009-10 time frame:

--------Web Link
Comcast Corp. said Thursday that by early 2010 it plans to offer consumers in most of its markets Internet service so fast they will be able to download a high-definition movie in minutes.
The nation's second-largest Internet service provider -- and biggest cable TV operator -- will deploy a technology capable of delivering up to 100 megabits of data Relevant Products/Services or more per second in 20 percent of its markets by the end of 2008, Comcast senior vice president of investor relations Marlene Dooner said at the Merrill Lynch U.S. Media Conference in London.
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